The Cruel Barbarity Of National Borders.

 

        This is not  new post, but I feel it has to be repeated, to highlight the plight of refugees fleeing death and destruction, and trying to start a new life in Europe. Bearing in mind that most of the death and destruction they are fleeing is the direct result of Western foreign policy. The silence on this engineered tragedy from our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is nothing short of criminal. Human suffering and deprivation on a massive scale, here in Europe and it is ignored. It is however what we expect from this system of nation states, that differentiates people according to nationality, grading humans as acceptable and not acceptable, depending on which spot on the planet they happen to be born. As long as we tolerate this system of nation states, we are complicity in the suffering of all refugees.

This from Act For Freedom Now:

           Following the death of a 5 years old child on the 10th October from a cause as yet unknown, one more was added to the previous ones in the detention centre of Moria. On Friday 20th October a 55 -year-old Iraqi passed away, being the 13th death in the concentration camps of the island. The medical exams showed a heart problem as the cause of death, while his co-detainees say that he had been complaining to the authorities and the NGOs over the last week without being given any attention. Same complaints exist for the death of the 5yr old girl, who had to sleep in a summer tent with her parents and 5 brothers, that were asking for blankets without being heard either. The authorities try to claim that the deaths in the detention centres are the result of natural causes or from chronic diseases; however they are nothing less than the transfer of the antimigration death-politics from the borders of Greece and EU on its own grounds. Thousand of migrants are trapped in detention centers, living under wretched conditions, exhausted by prolonged detention, and desperate from the uncertainty that surrounds them. The only cause of death is the devaluation of their lives from the racist policies of the state. As “foreign bodies” they are not entitled to have the same needs as all others, such as shelter, food, or access to the health system.
         As arrivals have increased significantly lately and asylum rates are frighteningly slow, more than 5,500 migrants are stowed away in Moria’s detention center, with its actual capacity not exceeding 2,500. This condition has made the situation intolerable for most of them posing beyond the other, and serious security issues for the weakest ones. A mixture of intertwined powers and repressive means is used to discipline immigrants, without however being always applicable.

        The latest example is the latest protest of some 150, mostly afghans, migrants, which has been going on since Friday 20/10. A serious fight between arab-speaking migrants and afghans in the detention center has led many of the detainees to refuse to spend any more days in it. Initially, they occupied the street in front of the center for a night, urging authorities to speed up their asylum claims, but also move them to safer places as there were many women and children among them. On Saturday morning they tried to march down to the city of Mytilene for a protest, but they were blocked by police forces at the entrance of the city. When the road opened again, they continued their march to Sapfo Square, the main square of the city where they decided to stay until their demands were met. From the beginning, the police presence was very intense in their attempt to terrorise the migrants but also the people that were coming to show their solidarity. Many of them had to pass from identification checks. However, the constant arrival of more and more people has led the police to withdraw from the square and the migrants spent the night in the square. Since Sunday morning and while police pressure against the people that were coming for solidarity continued, the authorities tried to convince them to abandon the square by promising them to speed up their procedures and transfer them to Kara Tepe’s center. Meanwhile, several migrants, with children among them, had to be transported to the hospital due to exhaustion. A serious hurdle for some of their demands to be met is being played by the UNCHR, which, according to reports, denies the registration of the protestors in Sappho Square for their transfer to Kara Tepe’s camp, asking them to return in the Moria centre, because they are afraid that this would set an example for other migrants as well.
        With the weather conditions being expected to worsen over the next days, the only solution for the migrants and the people in solidarity that stand next to them is the strengthening of the struggles. Against the state-capitalist barbarity, the culture of the borders, the nations and the nationalisms.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Every Day You Die Many Times.

         So we think we have a lot on our mind, what with austerity, Brexit, and the Indy-ref 2. Well perhaps we should spare a thought for those hundreds of thousands of refugees herded like cattle in various points on the continent of Europe. In Greece, in particular, their conditions are deteriorating rapidly from appalling to utterly inhumane and unbearable. Having managed, through grit, courage and determination, to extract themselves from the bloody dystopia that is the imperialist slaughter house of the Middle East, they find themselves trapped in a living hell. Just the other day, "an asylum seeker was found hanged in an apparent suicide at Greece’s largest port, shortly after aid agencies warned of mounting desperation among refugees trapped in the country. The 25-year-old Syrian man was carrying refugee application papers when he was found dead near passenger ferry departure gates in Piraeus, outside Athens." More than 1,500 refugees are living around the Greek port of Piraeus, but there are over 62,000 refugees trapped in Greece in concentration camps and elsewhere by the idiotic impractical EU-Turkey deal and other border closures across Europe. Of course this is capitalism, so there will be those standing by to make a profit from exploiting this trapped and desperate group.

         Research by Save the Children found more than 5,000 minors are living in “appalling conditions”, driving a mounting mental health crisis. It found that children as young as nine were self-harming and 12-year-olds attempting suicide, sometimes filming themselves in the act. A spike in drug and alcohol abuse by teenagers was also recorded, as dealers exploit them in the camps.

       The root of this "refugee crisis" is  of course, the world imperialists' blood stained foreign policy, their brutal, savage drive for control of the oil rich territory. Those unfortunate individuals and families, caught up in this mayhem of death and destruction, who see their homes, villages, towns, and cities being obliterated, and their families and friends being killed, and decide to try to make it to a safer place, are further hindered by those imaginary lines dawn on the planet's surface, borders. This is where the minders of the various states, stop the hungry, the sick, the maimed and the desperate, then make the arbitrary decision, which to accept and which to reject. Decisions that can mean, in many cases, the difference between life and death.
       The plight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the bloody fireball that is the Middle East, has somewhat, disappeared from our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, that does not mean that the problem has been solved, far from it, it just means that they have lost interest and have moved on to their usual bilge splurge of candy-floss and bubble gum, peppered with the odd cash and sex scandal.
       What is going on in the Middle East is still there, the misery is still being created, the death and destruction is still going on, and the hungry, the terrified, the desperate, are still trying to flee to a safer place, and the developed world, the cause of the problem, is still turning its back on them.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Deaths In European Concentration Camps.

 

         The horrifying plight of refugees trapped across Europe, in nothing short of cattle pens, is blatant racist state sponsored torture and murder. No where in Europe is this brutality more evident than in Greece, with its concentration camps dotted around the country. If you think concentration camps in Europe are a thing of the past, think again. There is no rational explanation for treating suffering and vulnerable people in this savage fashion, Europe is awash with wealth. It is deliberate state policy that is traumatising and killing these unfortunate humans that are fleeing death and destruction, planned and implemented by Western imperialism's greed driven foreign policy.  Obviously, free movement of people across Europe is an illusion, a fallacy, only for the chosen few.

This from Freedom:

        A barbarity against human existence itself is evolving in Greece. A serial crime, orderly by racist policies of the Greek Government. Refugee camps located throughout the country are structurally linked to the devaluation of human life. Deaths which have occurred within them are not coincidences or bad luck, they are the murderous effects of State racism. Every day that passes and concentration camps remain open finds refugees imprisoned in them, death gaining more and more space among the living — it becomes a banal daily routine. We must fight for the contrary: such death must not become normal.

Amid the hardest winter of recent years, thousands of people sleeping in summer tents, without access to clothing and medical care. Over the past ten days three refugees were killed in the camp of Moria bringing the total number of deaths in the camps in five. Among those who lost their lives was an infant, and there have been and another seven suicide attempts. The murderous nature of the camps is more than obvious.

        When the living conditions in the refugee camps cost human lives, official authorities remain publicly silent, and when forced to say something make qualifying statements, that they have “not yet identified the cause of death.” Their clumsy attempts to insinuate that the deaths are merely from natural causes and that there ultimately might not be a real issue simply confirms the size of the devaluation of human life taking place in the camps. Living in a condition where everyone can die and the reason never made known transforms prevention into a mere fiction.

      Despite the efforts of the government to convince us to the contrary, nothing can humanise the existence of the camps. Our struggle against them, worldwide, must be intransigent.

      The solidarity movement to refugees, the class forces in society, everyone who from the summer of 2015 until today has stood at the side of refugees and have turned solidarity in a public, open and social power, must join forces to create a major pole of social confrontation against the Euro-Turkish migration agreement, and eventually, to overthrow it. It is our duty towards human lives threatened by the racist policies being imposed. It’s the debt of life against death.

• Stop the shameful agreement between Europe and Turkey.
• Brook no more deaths in the hell of the refugee camps.
• Offer accomodation of refugees within our cities, offer asylum and equal rights for health, education and work
•  There must be free movement in Greece and the European Union

Anarcho-syndicalist Initiative Rocinante

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk